Thursday, 16 February 2017

Feminism is about control, not equality

EDIT: A piece from early 2016 that I didn't publish originally. Still worth a look I think, as I'm revisiting the same theme

Occasionally, when they think they are getting a bad press (or when soul-searching over the fact that very few people believe their bizarre opinions) feminists say things like "feminism is about equality". This is suitably vague, enabling them to "clarify" later on, I want to suggest that the only thing that makes sense of numerous strands of feminist behaviour is the unusually strong desire to exercise control others - very often men - by any means possible.

Control of language

Feminists in the 80s seemed to get quite excited about the word "chairman", which they wanted changed because, to quote one of them "it reflects a male-dominated society". That was the language they used in those days, I'm not sure "patriarchy" had caught on back then.

A couple of years ago, feminists en masse decided to use the #banBossy tag on twitter - they wanted the word "bossy" made illegal or unacceptable in some way because they thought (mysteriously) that it was used mainly about women.

One celebrity suggested that the word "fat" be banned too, apparently she believed this would be accepted by many people. It's probable that she will have thought this because of many conversations with friends where they all got rather overconfident about what things should be banned because they didn't like them, so this is more than just one person's eccentric idea

Finally there was a proposal to the EU in 2013 that anti-feminism be criminalised under "hate-speech" laws.

Feminists want to control what you say. George Carlin spotted this fact, though he was considerably more sympathetic to feminism than I am. They also hope, by doing so, to control what you think as well

Control of male sexuality

Feminist groups regularly complain about pornography, and the supposed attitudes it causes in adolescent boys. They've no evidence for this. Similarly to how computer games actually calm kids down, there is no evidence to suggest that the availability of porn increases the amount of sexual assault (even though the definition of such assault has been extended massively in recent years)

But feminists want to control it. Feminist groups also put pressure on governments to ban prostitution, on dubious grounds - and if they can make the legislation demonise the male clients rather than the sex workers themselves then all the better, In some cases this pressure pays off for them.

And finally we come to sex robots. Is there anyone who doesn't realise that the inventor of a perfectly realistic sex-robot is going to be an overnight billionaire? Yet feminists recoil from the idea. I think the laughably obvious reason for this is that - when such robots become available - women will lose their main method of influence over men.

One could be concerned about the effect the robots would have on relationships (hard to say), but I don't think that's what bothers feminists, exactly - though they may claim it is so. The motives for their behaviour become clear when you look at everything else they do. Their reaction to something unknown or frightening is to try and control it, and that goes 100% for the men around them,